I don’t see why you need to fall back on racial stereotypes to explain this discrepancy when a simple look at the political history can be used to explain quite a bit of the differences. And the part not explained can likely be attributed largely to differences in natural resources.
Mexico didn’t have even a nominal democracy until 1917. Even then it was highly repressive, corrupt, and non-responsive to the people. An opposition party candidate didn’t win the presidency until 2000. It’s rather hard to build a functioning economy on the back of a broken political system.
By contrasts, the US has had a functioning multi-party democracy with transparent, responsive elections for a much longer period of time - including multiple boom periods which Mexico largely missed out on.
Exactly. Jas09 pretty much hit it on the head. It’s really not all that difficult to understand why Mexico has had so many problems if you just freaking look at it’s history and it’s political system. Why folks want to fall back on ‘well, Mexican’s are just lazy’ is beyond me.
Because, as was said, you’ve got a political system that’s been historically unrepresentative and corrupt, with an economic policy that seesawed between “Let a few rich people own everything” and “Nationalize industry and let the state run it”. Add to that that it has an extremely rich country on its north that’s historically liked to interfere if it thought Mexico was getting out of linewith an endless appetite for cheap labor and also a ravenous appetite for marijuana, heroin, and cocaine, which means that drug gangs can make enough money to outfit their own private armies, and you’re going to have all sorts of economic instability.
And you have a lot of people wanting to enter Mexico too, remember. It gets a lot of immigrants, legal or otherwise, from Central America.
Yes, I would say it all boils down to governance traditions. The former Spanish colonial territories were governed under an aristocratic system originally oriented towards resource extraction. The Anglo colonies were settlement colonies with a less aristocratic mode of governance, with much broader engagement of the population in that governance, and rather less resource extraction oriented.
Changing the culture of governance is damned hard. Can be done, but damned hard.
Let’s keep it simple, shall we? Poverty is not about the things you say, at least not in the context of the OP, which was what my response was specifically directed at.
Poverty is about the relative standard of living - in this case, US vs Mexico (or as I put it, many of the countries of the world.) It’s pretty much unarguable that what passes for poor in the US would be ‘doing OK’ status in a lot of places, including Central and South America.
This is my opinion, too. A large percentage of the US population has historically been made up of people who had the drive and intelligence to make the effort to get here, whether they be Scots, Irish, Chinese, or Mexicans (to name just a few).
Mexico also has a large problem with illegal immigration. There are estimated to be several million illegal aliens in Mexico from Central and South America, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe. They don’t all make it to the US.
point granted, but Chile is a lot less populous than Mexico. So comparable number of immigrants in both places can result in very different outcomes. Well, I don’t see numbers on immigration scale back then, but right now population of German descent in Chile and in Mexico are both on the order of half a million. Right now total populations differ by an order of magnitude, and they may have still been very different back then, if not quite to such an extent.
As far as who grows how fast at any given time, that is not of the essence. There were times in German history when they were not growing, and there were times when they were, ahem, decaying. E.g. see the 1944-1947 period. It doesn’t matter what your instantaneous velocity is, as long as the general direction of movement is a clear one. Now as for those celebrated South American countries with high growth rates - their general long term direction is anybody’s guess. Just like many other things in this increasingly unpredictable world of ours.
Indeed. The smugging of American guns into Mexico is producing a social problem even more tragical then the smuggling of drugs from Mexico into the U.S.A.
And the Americans don’t care! What a hypocrital attitude of the U.S. government so ask Mexico to enforce the war against drugs, while they don’t enforce gun control back home!:dubious:
At least, not in Southern South America.
I lived in Canada in the 80s and early 90s, and theirs standard of living impressed me a bit, but not as much. In here, we have about 2/3 of the standard of living they had back there, no matter that statistics and economics tend to exagerate the difference.
But, as I said before, German-Chileans aren’t a different ethnic or racial group at all. They are just common Chileans that have German last names. Many still look “Nordish” and others are already mixed. Some still speak German and other have no idea about it.
But when Germans invite to theirs beerfests, everybody is invited to the party
sure they are. Now. They have assimilated over a century, all the while constituting a pretty major population segment and influencing business culture, military culture and national culture in general way out of proportion to their numbers.
Maybe if Mexico had been 10% German for a long time, it would have ended up more orderly and prosperous as well.
Out of proportion? That’s exagerated. The countries of the region had LOTS of foreign influences. We have been part of the “West” since the 15th century, actually, and from that time we have received from baroque to rock and roll.
The influence of German immigrants is interesting, in certain regions, but they weren’t the only ones. British, Americans, Italians, French, Croats, Arabs, Japanese and other groups have influenced us as much as Germans. However, you can find the most cultural influences in those regions that received large number of German immigrants. In the economical field, though, the dynamics is more international. Germany has many investments in Brazil, though, but comming directly from the Old World, rather than by local peoples.
Only in Brazil Germans exceed the mark of 1% of the population, so, in numbers, the Germanic influence in Lat Am is a lot smaller than in the U.S.
German Chileans article is here German Chileans - Wikipedia . There are 600K of them out of 17M population, or 3.5%. So yes, I was certainly wrong in my claim above that they are 10% of the population.
Their percentage in the population may have been bigger back in the late 19th century. Or maybe not - I don’t know where to get the numbers.
In general, in any country you always find the German minority doing very well, to the benefit of themselves and of people around them. In Russia they were doing so well that e.g. in 1914 one of the Russian generals invading Eastern Prussia (of all places…) was called Paul von Rennenkampf - Wikipedia .
600 K, but those figures are for German descendants, not Germans. Most of those Germans descendants don’t even look Germanic, as you may suspect. Culturally, most aren’t much different either. You find them in all sphere of life, but also in all social classes, including in poverty. I would guess that German Chileans that look German, speak German and still have a Germanic culture, are not more than 100K, living in the countryside at southern Chile and in some spheres of the society at the main cities.
I think the modern stereotype is that a white who has no education is lazy, so only non-whites get jobs like picking tomatos. I don’t know what we can deduce of that, unless that we should not deduce anything from stereotypes. But it is not irrelevant who colonized what, when and how.
Two main factors decided the extent of white colonisation: temperature and density of indigenous population. The malaria area in particular was something the white race had no hope with. In most cases, the white were unable, when willing, to exterminate agricultural population. The factor that makes the US east coast so special, is the timing of European disease and immigration. The east coast had a lot of cultivation, but all local cultures were in a state of disintegaration when the flux of English settlers started. Thus the nucleus of USA became a small strip with practically all-white population.
Spain did not have inter-Christian disputes. It solved its overpopulation (if there ever was such) by sending its muslim and jew populations all over the Mediterranean. Thus Mexico became a serf society with a small white upper class. One key factor in explaining democracy is literacy rate. A serf society with catholic dominance will not be pioneering there.
All in all, Mexico was not built for the average peasent and the average peasent knows that. I would compare that to Confedarate South. The average black knew that however hard he tried, he’s not going to be rewarded nor defended by the state and society. I don’t think the implications of that have entirely left the US today.
Wait a minute… we’re supposed to overhaul our Constitution and get rid of the second of 10 amendments to guarantee certain freedoms, all because Mexico can’t get its own law enforcement shit together?
Bzzt. Try again. Quit blaming us for all your problems. You make it sound like the entire descent of Mexico into drug war anarchy and violence is totally the fault of the US because we consume drugs and we have legal guns.
How about you tackle your own endemic corruption down there, and actually start enforcing your own laws, and see how that goes, huh?
